A new novel by Anne Tyler is always a reason to celebrate. As always, her exploration of everyday tragedy and the way people learn to cope with loss is, at times, comic, wise, and heartbreaking. Narrator Kirby Heyborne inhabits the forlorn Aaron and his dead wife, Dorothy, with a searing depiction of middle-class America and the drama of how a single random act can change everything. Heyborne’s pacing of the dialogue between the main characters is realistic and emotionally engaging. The pain of Aaron’s grief penetrates Heyborne’s performance. The novel imparts the wisdom we all gain through loss, and Heyborne’s narration resonates with the listener long after the last words are spoken. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

In Tyler’s latest novel, a physically disabled man named Aaron is devastated when his wife, Dorothy, is killed in a freak accident. As he tries to pick up the pieces of his life, Dorothy begins to appear to him from beyond the grave. Narrator Kirby Heyborne turns in a workmanlike performance in this compelling audio edition. Heyborne is sensitive and believable in his rendition of quirky, polite, and antisocial Aaron, who struggles to understand how to function after his wife’s death, while also facing painful truths about the ups and downs of his marriage. Heyborne’s nuanced narration captures the protagonist’s emotional growth, his grief, and the ways he is able to better understand himself and his needs. A Knopf hardcover. (Apr.)

In Tyler’s elegant 19th novel, Aaron is an editor at a vanity press with a crippled right arm and leg who thinks of himself as “unluckier but no unhappier” than anyone else. He meets Dorothy, a brisk, no nonsense doctor, while editing a medical tome, and they fall in love, marry, and muddle along until Dorothy dies in an accident that nearly destroys their home. Aaron moves in with his overprotective sister and begins seeing Dorothy’s ghost, spectral appearances that make him realize just how many fissures there were in their marriage. Tyler’s gentle style focuses on the details of daily life, and how the little things, both beautiful and ugly, contribute to the bigger picture. Tyler (Breathing Lessons, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988) portrays complex, difficult, loving individuals struggling to co-exist and find happiness together. This is no gothic ghost story nor chronicle of a man unraveling in his grief, but rather an uplifting tale of love and forgiveness. By the end of this wonderful book, you’ve lived the lives and loves of these characters in the best possible way. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Hannigan Salky Getzler. 150,000-copy announced first printing. (Apr.)

An absolute charmer of a novel about grief, healing, and the transcendent power of love . . . With sparkling prose and undeniable charm, Tyler gets at the beating heart of what it means to lose someone, to say goodbye, and to realize how we are all, perhaps, always ultimate beginners in the complex business of life . . . A dazzling meditation on marriage, community, and redemption.” —Boston Globe

“A pleasure to read . . . Classic Tyler . . . The wonder of Anne Tyler is how consistently clear-eyed and truthful she remains about the nature of families and especially marriage.” —Los Angeles Times

“Like a modern Jane Austen, Tyler creates small worlds where she depicts in minutest detail the intimate bonds of friendship and family.” —USA Today
 
“Anne Tyler is one of our national treasures, and The Beginner’s Goodbye puts all of her skills on display: her warmth and wit, her generous embrace of her flawed characters, her clear-eyed observations about the inner workings of a marriage and the enduring bonds between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.” —Jennifer Weiner
 
“The Beginner’s Goodbye is the purest distillation of an Anne Tyler novel imaginable.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Anne Tyler has no peer. Her books just keep getting better and better. In The Beginner’s Goodbye, I was surprised, intrigued, and delighted at every turn.”  —Anita Shreve

“Anne Tyler never disappoints . . . Her insights about life, love, aging, marriage, siblings, grief, and unexpected happiness grow richer and deeper with each passing year and book.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
“Over five decades of exuberant shape-shifting across the fictional landscape, Anne Tyler has cut the steady swath of a literary stalwart, writing novel after novel whose most memorable characters inhabit a cosmos all their own . . . What makes each story distinctive is the particular way its characters rebel against hereditary confines, cope with fateful crises, or forge relationships with new acquaintances who rock their world . . . Once again, Tyler exhibits her genius for the incisive, savory portrayal of marriage.” —Julia Glass, New York Times Book Review 
 
“This is what Tyler does better than almost any contemporary writer. She peers at the forgotten areas of the everyday, the bits that are hard to pinpoint, yet make up the bulk of our lives and relationships. And this, ultimately, is why she is such a satisfying writer: she looks at people—at life—from the inside out. This is a book not just about grief, but about hope . . . The Beginner’s Goodbye is diverting, certainly, but also deeply rewarding. There is, in short, no guilt in the pleasure of a new Tyler. We can only hope for many, many more.” —Sunday Times (UK)

“Beautifully intricate. By the exquisitely romantic emotional climax, Aaron’s ordinary life has bloomed into an opera.” —Entertainment Weekly
 
“Its insights will keep you up nights.  . . . Ranks high in the hierarchy of Tyler’s works. And what a lineup that is.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“Warm, smart, deliciously written.” —More magazine
 
“As always, Pulitzer Prize winner Tyler brilliantly explores a stunning range of human emotion, poignantly considering the challenges of death while creating lovable characters whose foibles capture our hearts. Essential reading.” —Library Journal
 
“One of the things that makes Tyler’s work so radiant is that she seems to believe that people are inherently good and that, thanks to that goodness, ordinary lives can contain moments of great beauty, dignity, and hope. The Beginner’s Goodbye has all three . . . [Told] with characteristic warmth, sympathy and wisdom.” —Daily Telegraph (UK)

“A scintillating gem of a novel . . . Exceptionally lithe and sparkling . . . A funny, sweet, and wise tale of lost and found love.” —Booklist (starred)
 
“Elegant . . . An uplifting tale of love and forgiveness. By the end of this wonderful book, you’ve lived the lives and loves of these characters in the best possible way.” —Publishers Weekly (starred, Pick of the Week)
 
“Anne Tyler writes about real life, and in common with the finest fiction writers, such as William Trevor and Alice Munro, she does not engage with fantasy, as she is well aware that the ordinary is sufficiently bizarre . . . She is effortless, wise yet never knowing, and establishes a sense of having thought deeply about the given facts of any story . . . She is also sympathetic without being sentimental . . . Yet again she has articulated the supreme difficulties of human communication in a calmly insightful exploration of love and truth, grief and reality.” —Irish Times 

In Tyler's latest work, publisher Aaron Woolcott has led a painful life. He suffers from a crippled right arm and leg, a speech impediment, and a domineering sister. Now, an accident takes the life of his wife, Dorothy, an independent woman who provided him with much-needed joy and balance. An overwhelmed Aaron attempts to start over despite interference from his sister and coworkers. Dorothy's ghost appears to help him through these trials and to try to find peace in his new life. VERDICT This quiet, reflective work touches thoughtfully on issues of loss and recovery. Reader Kirby Heyborne does an excellent job. Recommended to all Tyler fans and listeners who enjoy intelligent, low-key stories. ["Pulitzer Prize winner Tyler brilliantly explores a stunning range of human emotion, poignantly considering the challenges of death while creating lovable characters whose foibles capture our hearts. Essential reading," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ 4/1/12.—Ed.]—Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib.

Although crippled in his right arm and leg, Aaron has spent much of his life fending off his family's attempts to protect him from the world. A successful editor of a vanity press in Baltimore that publishes a series of beginner's guides to various subjects, Aaron one day finds himself falling in love with Dr. Dorothy Rosales, whom he has approached about helping to write The Beginner's Cancer. They soon end up married, but catastrophe strikes when a tree falls on their house and kills Dorothy. Unable to live in his house any longer because of memories and roof damage, Aaron goes to live with his sister. He moves through loss, despair, helplessness, and emotional paralysis until one day Dorothy appears to him in the street. Struggling with the meaning of her appearances, Aaron eventually comes to accept them as her way of both saying good-bye and helping him get over her death. VERDICT As always, Pulitzer Prize winner Tyler brilliantly explores a stunning range of human emotion, poignantly considering the challenges of death while creating lovable characters whose foibles capture our hearts. Essential reading. [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/11.]—Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Evanston, IL

Though the plot finds a man in early middle age coming to terms with the death of his wife, the tone of this whimsical fable is so light that it practically floats off the page. Some might consider the latest from Tyler (Noah's Compass, 2010, etc.) typically wise and charming, while others will dismiss it as cloying. She employs a first-person narrator, a 36-year-old man named Aaron, who works for a small-family publishing firm that specializes in its Beginners series. "These were something on the order of the Dummies books, but without the cheerleader tone of voice," explains Aaron, who proceeds to offer the sort of insight that could come from almost any Tyler novel: "Anything is manageable if it's divided into small enough increments, was the theory, even life's most complicated lessons." At the start of the book, Aaron is in the beginning stages of mourning, after a tree crashed through his house and crushed his slightly older wife. She was a doctor; Aaron is "crippled" and something of an oddball. As Tyler's readers recognize, we are each of us crippled and oddball, deep down inside, and the fact that Aaron's was a marriage of misfits makes it no different from any other. Early on, Aaron receives visits from his dead wife, whom no one else can see, and whom he admits might well be a projection or an apparition. If he is an unreliable narrator, he is also a flawed one, often sounding more like a much older woman than like a man his age (very few of whom use terms like "busy-busy"). Mourning is both a rite of passage and a process of discovery for Aaron, who early worries that, "I can't do this…I don't know how. They don't offer any courses in this; I haven't had any practice," but who is ultimately not a tragic but comic figure, one who will (more or less) live happily ever after. An uncharacteristically slight work by a major novelist.